In the spring of 1972, seven women were arrested for breaking a law that 1973’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision would summarily dissolve. Before that arrest was officially deemed unjust, those women were integral pieces of a Chicago-based collective that helped those who couldn’t wait for policy change to permit their actions. The Janes, an HBO Documentary directed by Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, premiered earlier this year as part of Sundance’s abortion-conscious programming, alongside Call Jane and Happening. Unlike its narrative counterparts (with Call Jane fictionalizing and star-studding the exact collective The Janes documents), Lessin and Pildes’ straightforward, engaging film has intimate access to real collective members who saw their underground abortion network as a duty, a calling and the only thing that made sense in the face of a total ban on reproductive autonomy.
The film opens with as dramatic a hook as a largely talking head-based documentary can. One collective member describes her harrowing experience with a mob-arranged abortion provider; one of the only options available at the time, aside from self-induced methods. Accompanied by archival and wisely chosen stock footage, she relays the textural flashes of the event: The seedy motel, the clinical procedure totally devoid of any comfort or anesthetic, the shocking levels of blood and the unexpected presence of another girl in the room, a stranger whose procedure was done with the same callousness as to whether either of them survived. It was only thanks to that double procedure—and that they both had someone else to make sure the other didn’t bleed out—that she lived to tell the tale.
This is only one of the horror stories that makes The Janes, the collective that provided thousands of women with a means to life-saving yet illegal services, so insoluble. Throughout the film, collective members give firsthand accounts of what drew them to each other and eventually bound them together, even through major burnout and stays in mental hospitals. Many come to reproductive justice through their own back alley abortions, and some through the utter helplessness they experience when tasked with providing unexpected emergency help for their sisters, friends and college roommates. Told in isolation, these incidents are terrifying. When laid side-by-side with archival footage of the hospital’s septic abortion floor and the hollow recollections of the nurses and doctors who witnessed firsthand the deaths of otherwise perfectly healthy young people, it’s obvious cause for a major reckoning.
One of the most interesting contextualizing frames of the documentary comes from the women’s frustration not only with their lack of agency over their own organs, but as dismissed comrades in other protests against state violence. As the social unrest of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s took hold in the streets of Chicago, women were often pushed to a talked-over status in groups from anti-war draft dodgers to socialist students to the Black Panthers. As one collective member recalls, they began to use these groups as springboards, funneling the women who felt voiceless to a cause that no one else seemed to care about—at least not as vehemently as it deserved. If abortion were to be a disregarded “women’s issue,” then it would have to be solved by those shrugged off.